Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase
-
I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)?
Any other tips?
EX:
http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html
OR
-
Are you serving the same page for both /MBA and /mba? You should set up a 301 redirect from one to the other.
In Analytics, you can set a custom filter to make your URLs case insensitive, but I don't believe that'll fix the data currently in your account, it'll only fix them going forward. That process is outlined here: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=90397.
My URLs are all lowercased so I can't actually find an example in my account to test, but when I do an advenced filter and select Include Page with the match type of "Matching RegExp" and try URLs with uppercase characters, Analytics appears to be making the query case insensitive. So you can try that as well.
If the prior paragraph didn't work for you, you can do this on a URL by URL basis, by doing an advanced search by regular expression and substituting in "[M|m][B|b][A|a]" for "mba".
-
John and Team,
Suppose I have a site with 8000 pages and a small percentage of them in google analytics are showing up twice because the pages are linked through upper and lowercase links. So in Google analytics (GA) there would be two rows:
http:///www.blah.com/MBA
Is there a type of query I can run in GA to allow me to find all pages where the url is the same except for the upper and lower casing? I want to go into GA at Standard Reporting -> Content -> all pages and do an advanced search.
-
Is the Short Title a redirect or the actual URL? If it's a redirect then it shouldn't be a problem. You can also use canonical if you want to use the lowercase and host the other page. But that's is a sloppy solution.
-
I agree with this completely. Lowercase with hyphens is my preference. Some E-commerce companies (let's use Volusion as an example), give you the choice to use hyphens or underscores in a product's URL. This is nice and they even offer you the ability to write what the URL will be under the "Short TItle" option. However, this "Short Title" option is what will show in your URL AND the link text for a "Related Product" listing on the site. So if I want the link text to look normal when someone sees a Related Product link, I have to capitalize the text I put for the "Short Title" which will then cause the URL to be in Caps as well. This is a pretty significant flaw in their system and I have alerted them to the problem numerous times. Hopefully they will get it fixed soon.
-
I agree. Lowercase in the example above. For ease of direct typing.
But when advertising just a website URL in print offline, caps. www.BulwarkPestControl.com is easier to read than www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com.
-
The fact a Caps create a 404 error on LAMP site is a pet peeve of mine - so is the fact Google thinks mix cases on IIS are separate (thus duplicate) URLs.
Too arbitrary to be picky about and cause user frustration.
Thanks goodness at lease DoMaInS can be what ever.
-
I like lowercase because when I type URLs by hand, I don't think to capitalize things. If you capitalize things, you have to get the casing right to make the URL valid (unless you're setting up all sorts of fancy redirects), otherwise you a 404 and are left scratching your head. Also, I agree with Dan that it looks better.
Hyphens vs. underscores is a classic question; Matt Cutts says to go with hyphens: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k. I like that better too.
-
Justin
I personally prefer lowercase because to me it looks better. And I prefer hyphens for the same reason, and it seems like these days everyone from WordPress right to the SEOmoz site does it that way.
-Dan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why Google crawl parameter URLs?
Hi SEO Masters, Google is indexing this parameter URLs - 1- xyz.com/f1/f2/page?jewelry_styles=6165-4188-4184-4192-4180-6109-4191-6110&mode=li_23&p=2&filterable_stone_shapes=4114 2- xyz.com/f1/f2/page?jewelry_styles=6165-4188-4184-4192-4180-4169-4195&mode=li_23&p=2&filterable_stone_shapes=4115&filterable_metal_types=4163 I have handled by Google parameter like this - jewelry_styles= Narrows Let Googlebot decide mode= None Representative URL p= Paginates Let Googlebot decide filterable_stone_shapes= Narrows Let Googlebot decide filterable_metal_types= Narrows Let Googlebot decide and Canonical for both pages - xyz.com/f1/f2/page?p=2 So can you suggest me why Google indexed all related pages with this - xyz.com/f1/f2/page?p=2 But I have no issue with first page - xyz.com/f1/f2/page (with any parameter). Cononical of first page is working perfectly. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Rajesh.Prajapati
Rajesh0 -
URL Parameters as pagination
Hi guys, due to some changes to our category pages our paginated urls will change so they will look like this: ...category/bagger/2?q=Bagger&startDate=26.06.2017&endDate=27.06.2017 You see they include a query parameter as well as a start and end date which will change daily. All URLs with pagination are on noindex/follow. I am worrying that the products which are linked from the category pages will not get crawled well when the URLs on which they are linked from change on a daily basis. Do you have some experience with this? Are there other things we need to worry about with these pagination URLs? cheers
Technical SEO | | JKMarketing0 -
Sitemaps, 404s and URL structure
Hi All! I recently acquired a client and noticed in Search Console over 1300 404s, all starting around late October this year. What's strange is that I can access the pages that are 404ing by cutting and pasting the URLs and via inbound links from other sites. I suspect the issue might have something to do with Sitemaps. The site has 5 Sitemaps, generated by the Yoast plugin. 2 Sitemaps seem to be working (pages being indexed), 3 Sitemaps seem to be not working (pages have warnings, errors and nothing shows up as indexed). The pages listed in the 3 broken sitemaps seem to be the same pages giving 404 errors. I'm wondering if auto URL structure might be the culprit here. For example, one sitemap that works is called newsletter-sitemap.xml, all the URLs listed follow the structure: http://example.com/newsletter/post-title Whereas, one sitemap that doesn't work is called culture-event-sitemap.xml. Here the URLs underneath follow the structure http://example.com/post-title. Could it be that these URLs are not being crawled / found because they don't follow the structure http://example.com/culture-event/post-title? If not, any other ideas? Thank you for reading this long post and helping out a relatively new SEO!
Technical SEO | | DanielFeldman0 -
Redirecting a Few URLS from One Domain to Another
Hello, I have two websites within a similar niche...some of the top organic traffic driving pages on Website B I'd like to redirect to a similar page on Website A. The reason is Website A is a bigger and better and is monetized much better as well. I only want to redirect a few of the main URLS on Website A and also only those that I have similar content on my main Website B. Is this process safe for SEO? What is the best way to go about this process. I am not really concerned with Website B and what happens to it's rankings, but in the meantime, I'd like to redirect the traffic from some of it's main organic traffic driving pages to my main website A and to it's similar pages. I am also concerned with making sure my main website A stays white hat and doesn't receive any negativity from these redirects. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | juicyresults0 -
Cost/Benefit of modifying a URL
Just as the title says, I'm looking for the cost/benefit breakdown of modifying a URL for SEO purposes. What are some examples of issues where the benefit outweighs the cost, and vise-versa? Thanks all! Frank
Technical SEO | | FrankSweeney0 -
Category URL Duplicate Content
I've recently been hired as the web developer for a company with an existing web site. Their web architecture includes category names in product urls, and of course we have many products in multiple categories thus generating duplicate content. According to the SEOMoz Site Crawl, we have roughly 1600 pages of duplicate content, I expect primarily from this issue. This is out of roughly 3600 pages crawled. My questions are: 1. Fixing this for the long term will obviously mean restructuring the URLs for the site. Is this worthwhile and what will the ramifications be of performing such a move? 2. How can I determine the level and extent of the effects of this duplicated content? 3. Is it possible the best course of action is to do nothing? The site has many, many other issues, and I'm not sure how highly to prioritize this problem. In addition, the IT man is highly doubtful this is causing an SEO issue, and I'm going to need to be able to back up any action I request. I do feel I will need to strongly justify any possible risks this level of site change could cause. Thanks in advance, and please let me know if any more information is needed.
Technical SEO | | MagnetsUSA0 -
Disallowing https URLs
It there a problem disallowing all https URLs to be indexed in order to avoid duplication? This is the article recommending this practice - http://blog.leonardchallis.com/seo/serve-a-different-robots-txt-for-https/ Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Problem with canonical url and session ids
Hi, i have a problem with the following website: http://goo.gl/EuF4E Google always indexes the site with session-id, although i use canonical url in this page. Indexed sites: http://goo.gl/RQnaD Sometimes it goes right, but sometimes wrong. Is it because we separate our session-id with ";" as separator? In the Google Webmaster Tools, i can´t choose jsessid as a parameter, so i think google does not recognize this. But if we have to change it (f.e. ? as separator) we have to spend many days in programming. Any ideas? thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | tdberlin0